“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.” Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Here are this week’s responses to the last Wednesday Writing Prompt, A Beautiful Place for Mortal Beings, October 2. After September’s justified global focus on climate change and climate action, we turn our attention to the beauty and peace that is still available and to our deeply sensed connection with the source of our being through nature.
The many gifts bequeathed to us by Nature are celebrated today with poems from John Anstie, mm brazfield, Paul Brookes, Anjum Wasim Dar, Irma Do, Sheila Jacob, and Sonja Benskin Mesher. We welcome, Ben Naga, new to our pages but a stellar poet with a considerable body of fine work available to sample via his blog.
Enjoy! and do join us for the next Wednesday Writing Prompt, which will post tomorrow morning. All are welcome to come out and play, no matter the stage of your career: beginning, emerging, or pro.
Soul Food
Planted splat firm atop this green hill
Taking time to return to the source
A cloud or two, the occasional bird
Higher peaks a shadowed backdrop
Thankful miles from the muscle bustle
(Raw cells, fibres dancing a frenzied jig
Cringing under the whip of urgency
Mad underlying insistence on arrival
At all cost – lest the unthinkable …
Their journey demoted to annoyance)
Breathing, inhaling the plenitude
Mere presence the sole attainment
Destination attained and time to
Inhale … relax … exhale …
Enjoy the sumptuous display
© 2019, Ben Naga
Welcome, Ben Naga!
Ben’s site is: Ben Naga, Gifts from the Musey Lady and Me. “Laissez-moi vous recanter ma vraie histoire.” Read his ABOUT. It is delivered in a poem and well worth your time to visit.
Unlike the rose, whose life
is all too short;
whose beauty, transient,
strikes the heart
olfactory refrain,
melancholic pang,
intoxicating ache,
caressing right brain
you … you resist the tides,
whose rhythms try to change,
but never seem to wear you down;
you bear them easily.
The temporal perspective
that measures your sojourn
belittles our lives
to appear as nought.
You draw out the time
to more than long,
so barnacles and limpets
can confidently cling
to your immense foundation;
testament to your solidity;
our permanence is relative
as it sits beside you, Rock.
But how significant are we
considering the Universe?
By how much mega-time is
it’s longevity, beside ours?
And yet neither you, Rock
nor Universe can judge,
because
there is no poetry
in the cosmos
without a human soul.
© 2011, John Anstie
John . . .
Ryan Mountain
a young girl i was
when i drove to the desert
i took what Allen dropped
when he was young
like i was
the Joshua Trees
imperial yes they were
tall a strong dark green
some with arms bent up at the sky
which by the way Sky did rain on me
a supple velvety soothing rain
i slipped a little higher
the rocks they opened their slate stained eyes
and the he snake slithered from their underneath
the rain she smelled like new born clay
the vitality of her holy droplets
caused the birds and lizards to come alive
in a jubilant resurrection
at which time i had ten hands
but i could still see my cut up shirt
doused in the liquid of the day
me thinks Dylan Thomas and i could have made love
in dream of mercy a girl laughing with the crimson ants
and the ashy grasshoppers orchestrated with their legs
auditory melodious delight
the horizon a throne
golden
filled with blue angels
as i tilted my face toward the west
the Queen Sun released me into sedation
© m m brazfield
mm’s site is: Words Less Spoken: Gen X’er chronicles the art form of living in the Angelino metropolitan environment through poetry, creative writing, art, photography, and culture.
A Dawn Chorus (Vacana 11)
O, Lady of the Breath.
how to arc in your air?
A dozen or more tiny caves
sing you into the world
from the trillbudded barkskin
volume and delivery
a root that connects with
its origin tree,
broadcasts to my ears,
territory songs,
and chat up lines, a Saturday
night on the town played out
on a morning before the wormshop,
home repair, teach bairns how to fly
© 2019, Paul Brookes
Inhale Dappled, A Perfumed Air
step through cast
illuminated windows
of tree crowns,
birdsong lilts blossom fall.
Key all senses keener.
See claw hunt feather.
Feathered mams rescue bairns
from hungry talons. Bigger birds
snatch fluffy kids from nests
to feed their young. Beetles battle
over territory. All fend, forage
in this vision of quiet.
© 2019, Paul Brookes
NEWS TODAY! – There’s a lovely photo of Paul HERE for Wombwell’s Pride of Place Project and HERE is a link to a poetry reading Paul did that was recorded and posted on YouTube.
Paul Brookes, a stalwart participant in The Poet by Day Wednesday Writing Prompt, is running an ongoing series on poets, Wombwell Rainbow Interviews. Connect with Paul if you’d like to be considered for an interview. Visit him, enjoy the interviews, get introduced to some poets who may be new to you, and learn a few things.
Prolific Yorkshire Poet, Paul Brookes
The Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Jamie Dedes
- Paul’s Amazon Page U.S. HERE
- Paul’s Amazon Page U.K. HERE
More poems by Paul at Michael Dickel’s Meta/ Phore(e) /Play
A beautiful place for mortal beings would be
the forests, let us for a while be nemophilists
and haunt the woods, step on pine needles,
hear nature’s soft rustling crunch of love
let the sunshine seep down from entwined
embracing eternal friends of the verdant sea
rooted to the inner essences of fertile Mother
Earth’s endless riches of black gold firm holds’
at the foliage edge, divinity reveals the unseen
dome, its twinkling silver studded umbrella,epic
unmoved whirling,unnoticed dissolving darkness-
Komorebi awakens ferns to whisper prayers
so mortal brings can walk through a rainbow
with feet on velvet green, breathe freshness
feed on fruit,hear soft soothing sithurisms
no hate or conflict or curfew or cutting bonds
our mortal life is love and beauty mystified
infirmity overtakes desire, our werifesteria
goes unsolved but in spirit we exist,witness
miracles, alive in soul we succumb to eternity
© 2019, Anjum Wasim Dar
Anjum’s sites are:
“POETRY PEACE and REFORM Go Together -Let Us All Strive for PEACE on EARTH for ALL -Let Us Make a Better World -WRITE To Make PEACE PREVAIL.” Anjum Wasim Dar
The Maple at the End of My Street
The setting sun filters
Through your leaves
Highlighting the new
Yellows and oranges and reds
I see you
As I drive away
Every morning going
Through the motions
That life is ok
Even when it’s not
You filter the beauty
Back in my life
© 2019, Irma Do
.
Church Window In Trefriw
We’ve heard the Crafnant
since daybreak.
It’s chimed across pebbles,
gurgled under the bridge
beside the Woollen Mill
and now, it won’t leave us.
We’re learning its tune,
transcribing it to memory
while we explore
beneath wooden rafters:
stand in sudden stillness,
before a small window.
A small window
stained with poppy red
and summer-sky blue,
its figures so graceful,
and translucent
we wonder
if water rose up
from the nearby river,
held Mary and her Child
in its flowing mantle
and set them, smiling,
into their warm stone niche.
© 2019, Sheila Jacob
To purchase Sheila’s little gem of a volume, Through My Father’s Eyes (review, interview, and a sampling of poems HERE), contact Sheila directly at she1jac@yahoo.com
..no word..
that feeling, that
arrives unexpected from darkness, some winters’ mornings,
opening the door to the sound of one black bran bird calling.
track four repeated. that
comes on waking finding peace and comfort bound in clean
linen.
arises with perfume, an uncertain memory.
it may be chemicals, peptides in the brain as love, what
ever the germ or warfare
I find no word to describe, no random feather nor dust on
my plate. pass a finger.
that feeling of trimmed nails upon the keys pounding
words and silences.
while music plays. that feeling. that.
syrup stings my tongue.
© 2019, Sonja Benskin Mesher
..wonder..
rhythms of black birds ; black jack ; flap jack stream of consciousness
these recollections ; another time eighteen hundred eighteen hundred …
i wish i wrote like others with words of wonder full syllables, bells ringing, you know.
© 2019, Sonja Benskin Mesher
Sonja’s sites are:
Jamie Dedes. I’m a freelance writer, poet, content editor, and blogger. I also manage The BeZineand its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights. Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.
Recent and Upcoming in Digital Publications Poets Advocate for Peace, Justice, and Sustainability, How 100,000 Poets Are Fostering Peace, Justice, and Sustainability, YOPP! * The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice, August 11, 2019 / This short story is dedicated to all refugees. That would be one in every 113 people. * Five poems, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019 * From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems), July 2019 * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review, July 2019 * Three poems, Our Poetry Archive, September 2019
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
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